NOAH

Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain all day, rain all night, 

Rain at daybreak, rain at noon, rain unrelenting,

Rain unceasing, rain showers swelling to downpours;

Unending rain clogging air, liquefying land, loosening rocks;

Incessant rain throbbing on the rafters, pounding in my head.

For forty days and forty nights earth drowned in a great deluge,

Torrential rain falling in buckets, like stinging wasps on my face

When I stuck my head out the porthole.

It began with an iron pot closing over the sky,

Shutting out the sun with a shroud of clouds.

Like curtains rippling in an open window,

Clouds coiled and boiled into braided, tangled ropes;

Like wrestlers locked and strained in twisting holds,

Clouds billowed and swelled and massed high,

Piling Pelion on Ossa, heaping range above range;

Clouds rose into towering, threatening thunderheads

Like anvil tops ready to receive God’s hammering blows.

For a week, lightning crackled and thunder rumbled in warning;

Then the earth broke open and disgorged geysers and fountains

That reached to the sky; then the heavens cracked open bellies

Of water spilling down to the waters below until the earth drowned.

We heard the wind howl in twisting contortions, beating down trees,

Hurling debris like a giant, dragging and clattering in deafening din.

Doors slammed, windows shattered, walls shook, the ark creaked

Against its blocks, and scaffolds buckled with the strain,

As the waters rose.

Grey clouds unfolding dark flags, darker banners and darkest storms

Unleashed God’s wrath in a watery apocalypse of warring elements.

Raindrops ran into thickening rivulets, threads of water were braided

In channels, streams overflowed banks, and rivers rising over houses

Carried floating carcasses of horses and cows, pigs and sheep,

Bloated with hooves waving as they bobbed in the chop.

The currents tore down dwellings, swept away history,

Erased terrain and melted mountains into mudslides.

As the ark passed a high mountain, a family clung to rocks

While the waves licked up the sides eager to swallow them.

The men cried out for help 

While the women held up children,

Appealing to our compassion, pleading for their lives.

It was not because we recognized them as mockers

Who scoffed at us while we built the ark

That we didn’t stop to help.

It was just that there was no more room in our refuge,

And our cargo too precious to risk crashing into rocks.

Besides, God had covered the ark and we were shut in.

I had warned my neighbors the rains were coming,

Preached to them to repent and turn to their Maker,

To save themselves from the coming wrath of God,

But they kept feasting and keeping their revelry,

Eating, drinking, merry making, and marrying,

With no thought for tomorrow.

I could hear them crying out in the storm,

“How can a good God abandon us?”

My heart broke at their plight and I wanted to save them,

To jump into the maelstrom with a rope tied to my waist,

But my sons held me back.

Would that I could have exchanged 

My salvation for their damnation!

While we waited for the rain to stop,

For the descending downpours

Joining the ascending floods

In a chiastic hourglass

To reach their peak and cease,

To dissipate and abate, receding

Back down to the drowned ground,

Time stood still;

One day washed into the next, 

One endless day of endless rain

Washing away the world’s dross,

With time to ponder God’s wrath.

Why had this terrible catastrophe come about?

What made the Creator become the Destroyer?

How did an unchangeable God regret making man?

While building the ark I had preached to the curious:

“Tremble in fear, you godless people heedless of good!

Behold, the storm of the Lord will burst out in wrath, 

A whirling wind swirling down on the heads of wicked. 

The fierce anger of the Lord will not turn back 

Until he fully accomplishes the intent of his heart. 

In days to come you will understand this.”

I had preached in the hope that men would turn back

To God, turn away from their evil, sinful, godless ways.

In truth, I had not fully understood the fury of His anger

When I preached these words of warning, hoping more

For hyperbole and mercy, for a repentant reconciliation.

It was man’s malice and vice that provoked God’s wrath;

Every intention of the heart’s imagination was always evil.

According to our deeds we merited His awful fierceness,

Restrained by His merciful patience until unbridled sin

Brimmed over the wine cup of his anger and spilled out,

Tipping the equilibrium and equanimity of divine justice.

Sin had tickled God’s nostrils and He sneezed up a storm,

For His wrath is just, His anger justified, His justice absolute.

The children of men had multiplied and spread out across the earth,

Commingling the generations of the line of Cain and the line of Seth.

Corrupting God’s gifts and blessings and abusing power and justice,

The line of Seth grew proud of their lineage, trusting in their name,

Calling themselves sons of God and asserting angelic descent,

Claiming their rights to entitlements and demanding benefits,

Floundering in a liminal transition of ambiguous confusion,

Apostatizing their calling to serve and honor the Creator;

Deceived by the trickster to abandon their faith in God,

Forgetting the terrible consequences of the Fall,

These were led astray and lost their way,

Letting their lights grow dim.

Meanwhile, the line of Cain increased guilt and perfected violence.

Kings who claimed the divine right of absolute power and might

Oppressed their people and flouted God’s rule; priests claiming

God’s presence preyed on widows, seduced waifs and orphans,

Deceived the wealthy, robbed the poor, flaunted their priesthood,

And replaced Creator worship with graven idols and empty ritual.

Warlords gathered gangs of miscreants and attacked with terror;

They decapitated heads, quartered limbs, and mutilated torsos;

They built vast trophies, instruments of torture, towers of skulls,

Blank holes gazing sightless at tossed crowns and torn mitres.

Commemorating their gruesome battles on bas relief walls,

They buried nobility alive in megalithic chamber tombs,

Killing their kings by hanging, drowning, and burning

In the threefold death of wicker men and bog bodies.

They sacrificed virgins and captives and invoked evil,

They cut out the beating hearts of their living victims,

They devised unspeakable tortures for their enemies,

They persecuted Sethites and burned them in pyres,

They practiced necromancy and druidic fertility rites,

They searched the deepest, darkest secrets of sorcery,

All the secrets of the angels and the violence of demons,

The power of witchcraft and the power of molten metals,

The power that sparks creation and wreaks destruction.

The luster of burnished metals drove their lust for blood;

They aligned constellations with massive dragon stones,

They learned to pronounce the unpronounceable name,

And utter oaths to conjure dread and bid fearful forces

Arise from darkness and help forge weapons of death.

Cain’s brood left a trail of violence, terror, and carnage,

Followed by vultures, jackals, and carrion feeding beasts.

When the sons of God lusted after the daughters of men,

Whose game was temptation, seduction, and enticement

Played with sinuous curves and snake-charming swaying

To hypnotize the prey, to captivate and capture the foolish,

The sons of God were drawn drooling into the witch’s web.

Beguiled by beauty, enticed by flattery, allured by charms,

Enchanted by fluttering eyes, captivated by velvet voices,

Intoxicated by fragrant perfumes and entranced by flesh,

They lost a holy cover and followed their partners in sin,

Marrying and mating with whomever they chose.

Unequally yoked as light with darkness, 

The royal throne with the priestly altar,

The city of God and the city of man 

Became a sprawling metropolis

Of slums and palaces, 

Bazaars and arenas, 

Temples and towers,

Where angels and women copulated openly and killed freely,

Committing corruptions, atrocities, and vilest abominations.

Breeding a race of mad titans, tyrants, perverts, and giants,

The Nephilim, the fallen ones who once terrorized the earth,

Who became celebrities of old, the mighty men of renown,

Who glorified themselves at the expense of God’s glory, 

Who, void of soul, became vainglorious, like vampires,

Sucked life out of the living and robbed joy from life.

Lascivious, enslaved spirits, condemned to haunt

Tortured souls, afflict, attack, oppress, possess, 

Battle, destroy, mirror the heavenly war on earth,

And advance the strategies of Satan against God,

They harassed lost humanity with dread despair.

These demonic spirits became legion, like flies

Clouding a noisome cadaver with hellish noise.

Then Yahweh, the Existing One, said,

“My Spirit will not contend with man’s straying flesh forever,

Therefore his days will number one hundred and twenty years.”

One hundred and twenty years of leniency before judgement;

The years left before the Flood became life’s shorter measure;

Time enough to turn back to God, to turn from evil, sinful ways,

Time enough to repent before death’s door and judgment day,

Time enough for kindness to gladden hearts in life’s darkness.

One hundred and twenty years, the longest a man could live,

For cutting short longevity kept humans from sinning longer,

Though I was five hundred years old when Shem was born.

The Lord was sorry that he had made man and He grieved,

Pained by the sorrow that sin had caused all His creation,

And sad at the rebellion that had robbed man of his joy.

Accommodating to our understanding his hatred of sin

By anthropomorphizing his pure emotions of revulsion,

God revealed his displeasure in the language of regret;

For God is not a man that He should lie,

Nor a son of man that He should repent.

Immutable, impeccable, impassible and pure in aseity,

God is nevertheless passionate, patient, loving, caring,

And relentless in anger against those who oppose Him,

For the heat of His purity must burn the dross of impurity.

From our side of heaven it seemed that God had changed,

As from a spinning earth we perceive the sun to rise and set,

But we the ones who move relative to God

Who does not change like shifting shadows.

Transcendent and immanent, eternal, out of time,

God had foreknown the Fall and anticipated vice

To purpose a good with power to prevail over evil.

The same power that out of nothing created good

Could return to the same nothing a corrupted good,

That which had fallen from Him who sustains what is good.

Another more terrible thought: if created with eternal souls,

Could corrupted good be condemned to exist forever

In a place of torment and punishment far from God,

Far from the kind mercies of His covenant love,

Yet present in the fullness of His just wrath?

Whether fallen souls and rebellious angels

Were assigned to eternal oblivion 

Or sustained in Sheol’s eternal burning perdition,

Remained a question for conjecture or revelation.

For as the good soul doctor said, 

“Evil cannot exist without good,

Because the natures in which evil exists, 

In so far as they are natures,

Are good.”

Ultimately God’s wrath was a mystery

To which I yielded in humility and trust,

Too fearful for longer contemplation.

So the Lord said,

“I will wipe from the face of the earth 

The human race I have created—

And with them the animals, 

The birds and the creatures 

That move along the ground—

For I regret that I have made them,

For the earth has been corrupted

And is full of violence because of them.”

Man’s violence and pollution triggered 

A violent reaction from creation’s face

In response to the Creator’s decree;

Heaven and earth sobbed a torrent 

Of cleansing tears to wash away

Rebellion’s stain and evil’s fears,

To mitigate the virulent threat

Of mankind, infected by sin,

And reboot creation’s soul

Through the chosen seed.

To my great surprise,

I, Noah, found favor in the eyes of the Lord;

Chosen before time to be among those elect.

Now my father, Lamech, had named me “Rest,”

Prophesying that his son would become a savior,

Bringing rest from work and relief from the labor

Of long toiling and tilling the cursed, hard ground.

Little did he know that God would drown the earth

And make me the seminal father of a surviving family,

And the covenant representative for every living being.

Early on, I had listened to my mother tell me about God,

How He had blessed me at birth 

With long locks as white as wool,

With a body white as snow and red as a rose,

With beautiful eyes that on opening shone like the sun

And filled the whole house with radiant delight and joy.

She told me I looked like a son of God, an angel of light,

Who spoke with the Lord and babbled blessings at birth.

Trust a mother to exude such exaggerations of her child.

In truth,

I had chosen to follow a path of faith and righteousness,

Becoming a man of integrity and prayer, seeking after God.

So when the Lord revealed to me that I should build an ark,

Having warned me of His plan to wash out man’s corruption,

He established His covenant with me as His rightful servant,

He declared me righteous in this generation and called me

To fulfill His purpose, to represent His justice, and to speak

With His voice and authority to a violent and doomed world

That now merited death, having rebelled against life’s Lord.

I did as commanded and received His promise in the faith

That He would save me and my family and select creatures

Chosen by grace to enter into the covenant ark of salvation,

Our sanctuary from God’s wrath, the tabernacle and temple

Where we met with our Lord in worship, fellowship, and prayer.

The ark became our home, our world, a refuge from the storm,

An open door into the promise of a life resurrected after death,

And we became God’s remnant people, priests of His kingdom,

Consecrated to proclaim His coronation as the Lord of creation.

Wisdom built the ark out of gopher wood, caulked with pitch,

Crafted to precise measurements with separate rooms,

A roof, and three decks: lower, upper, and middle.

A wide panoramic window capped the pyramid,

Letting light shine into the darkness within,

With an ample door to let in the animals 

Along a ramp to the middle deck.

Two by two, 

Male and female from every kind

Entered the ark;

Seven pairs of clean animals 

And one pair unclean.

The day we loaded the animals into the ark was a sight to behold!

As if on a signal the birds flew in formation to alight in the rafters,

And a parade of beasts came through the streets in dusty clouds,

Cheered in derision by crowds hooting in laughter and shouting,

“You couldn’t fit four elephants in that fancy floating coffin!

Will you fit the giraffes by cutting off their necks and legs?

How will your zoo float with so many beastly animals?

Will they take turns rowing or will they shit together?

What about the dinosaurs and wooly mammoths?

No way a boat that big and heavy could float!”

That last one did make me doubt for a moment,

And the mastodons did resist herding into the ark,

So we left them behind with the dinosaurs, but the elephants

Like docile dogs followed us to their pens on the middle deck.

I felt like Adam naming the animals as they paraded past me,

Waiting for a second birth inside a wooden womb

Filled with creation’s remnant reserved for rescue.

By a miracle, the animals all fit in the ark 

With not a mouse to spare.

The only incident was a bear who mauled some mocking boys.

The rains began in the second month of my six hundredth year,

Whether on the seventeenth or twenty-seventh day, I can’t recall.

The rains made me melancholic and introspective,

And I thought of the past, my lineage from Seth, 

Adam’s heir and likeness, made in his image.

I remembered my antediluvian ancestors like Methuselah,

My long-lived grandfather who inspired me to seek after God,

Who passed away in peace the year the rains began to fall,

Five years after his son, Lamech, my father went to his rest;

They all died who came before me, and I expect to die too.

But then I remembered my great grandfather,

The other Enoch, seventh from Adam,

The one who walked with God,

And he was not, for God took him. 

Taken up to the fires of heaven, 

Enoch had seen visions of angels,

Mountains shaking and hills trembling,

And God appearing and treading on earth,

A Son of Man to sit on His throne of glory,

And judge the earth for her sum of sins.

Looking forward to the end of time,

Enoch had prophesied, promising peace

To the righteous, protection for the chosen,

Mercy for all those belonging to the Holy One;

Peace, prosperity, and blessings appearing as light

To those who receive God’s help in times of trouble.

I had cried out to him three times in consternation

Over the abject and dismal condition of man,

“Hear me, hear me, hear me.”

I remembered his response:

“See, the Lord is coming 

With thousands upon thousands of his holy ones 

To bring judgement on all and destroy the wicked,

And to convict all of them of all the ungodly acts 

They have committed in their ungodliness, 

And of all the defiant words 

Ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.”

In my time these people had already

Become grumblers and faultfinders

Who followed their own evil desires,

Who boasted about themselves,

And flattered others 

For their own advantage;

And met doom in the Deluge.

Because of Enoch’s testimony

I began hoping in a resurrection,

And a redeemer who would ransom us,

Who would deliver us from sin and death,

Who would rescue us from slavery’s curse,

And restore our holiness

So that we could walk with God again –

As in the Garden of Eden.

How I longed for a redeemer who would save us from evil,

Who would deliver us from overwhelming waters of wrath,

The promised Seed preserved for posterity in my loins.

I thought also of the future, my legacy to my sons,

Shem, Ham, and Japheth, alone with their wives,

Alone with the rescued animals to start a new world.

Would they hold on to their faith in God’s goodness,

And found great nations that spread out over the earth,

That at the end of time would respond to God’s call to Himself?

On the ark we prayed lauds and vespers, morning and evening,

To mark time and move light’s hinges and turn our hearts to God,

Reminding Him to remember his preservation covenant with us.

Hearing our prayers, 

God remembered me and the animals,

And sent a great wind over the earth,

As on the first day of creation,

And the rains ceased after forty days,

The great springs stopped spouting 

And the clouds closed their wells;

Light broke through the clouds like sword thrusts 

Dispelling the darkness and dissipating the storm.

When we sounded the waters with lead and line, the plummet

Plumbed down to a depth of fifteen cubits, half the ark’s height

Above the highest mountains; water covered over the world.

Every living creature with breath drowned, man and animals,

Everything that moved on earth, creeping things, flying birds,

Everything that swarmed, all flesh and cattle and wild beasts,

And all people perished, wiped out from the face of the earth,

Condemned, dispossessed, and destroyed in God’s judgment;

Only the fish and I were left, and those with me in the ark.

With my wife, my three sons and their wives,

We eight had survived earth’s holocaust,

Prevailed through the trial by water,

Endured the ordeal of judgment,

And braved the cleansing flood 

That swept sin’s wild deluge.

We had been baptized 

Through immersion 

In the flood waters,

As if released into death,

And emerged from the water

As if receiving new lives.

Justified by our faith,

Made righteous by grace,

With our consciences made clean,

We were born again by water and blood;

Under the sun shining through clear skies,

We became a covenant community of survivors;

For it is written,

“When the storm has swept by, 

The wicked are gone, 

But the righteous stand firm forever.”

Cocooned in God’s covenant protection,

We floated for five months with no land in sight,

Until the waters began to subside and recede.

In the seventh month the ark berthed on Mount Ararat,

But I can’t recall if it was the seventeenth or twenty-seventh day;

I do remember it was a Sabbath day when the ark came to rest,

A day reserved for our repose, a day dedicated to worship when

We consecrated the consummation of our salvation with praise. 

On the first day of the tenth month we spied the topmost peaks,

The summits of the tallest mountains in Armenia exposed to air,

Breaking through the waves as the sun rays pierced the clouds

To ignite the jutting pinnacles with rose flames and crimson fire,

And our hopes revived. 

At the end of forty days, I opened a window and released a raven;

The raven who ate freely at our table, who perched on our shoulders,

Who followed us around on inspections squawking critical comments;

Our feckless, feathered friend flew above the ark, circling for height, 

Then flapped and fluttered off to become a speck on the horizon,

And nevermore returned.

Then I took one of the two doves and cupping her in my hands

Brought her to my lips and kissed a blessing on her soft wings;

Finding no perch on the watery earth she returned to the ark,

Exhausted from having hovered in vain over the dark waters;

Then reaching out with my hand I brought her back to myself,

Reminded of how my Lord receives my weariness into His rest.

After a week I released her again, and this time she returned

To me at evening, and in her beak a freshly picked olive leaf!

My heart leapt with joy and I received my Lord’s assurances:

Peace in His promise, concord in covenant, felicity in faith.

Another week passed as the flood waters abated,

And a third time I released the dove

Knowing she might not return,

But not before hearing her 

Coo a consoling comfort,

“The creation is safe!”

REFERENCES:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Deluge.pg

Genesis 5-8

Jude 1:14-16

Proverbs 10:25

Matthew 24:36-39

Luke 17:26-27

Hebrews 11:7

1 Peter 3:18-22

2 Peter 2:4-9

Augustine, The City of God, Book 15, section 11 – Of the fall of the first man, in whom nature was created good, and can be restored only by its Author.

Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

Meredith G. Kline, Kingdom Prologue: Genesis Foundations for a Covenantal Worldview

Bruce A. McDowell, Noah: A Righteous Man in a Wicked Age 

Dr. Jay Winter, The Complete Book of Enoch, Standard English Version

Sin’s wild deluge brave – “Take Up Thy Cross,” from Germany